Posted on 08/12/2025 3:47:18 PM PDT by karpov
President Trump has nominated an unqualified economist to take over one of America’s most important statistical agencies.
On August 1, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS produces the consumer price index and the jobs report, two of the most important statistical products of the U.S. government, among hundreds of other reports and thousands of data series.
Some tried to defend Trump’s move by saying he was demanding improvements to the agency’s methodology, which is in need of updating. The response rate to the employer survey for the jobs report has declined since Covid, and online surveys should be a larger part of the BLS’s methodology going forward.
Trump quickly undercut those defenders by saying later in the same day that he fired McEntarfer because he believed the jobs reports were “rigged” against Republicans. He was shooting the messenger of bad economic news based on bias against Republicans that does not exist. BLS revisions to the jobs numbers, a regularly scheduled part of the reporting process as better data become available, have gone both ways under presidents of both parties and demonstrate exactly the pattern one would expect from the random errors inevitable in statistics.
What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.
Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.
Whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Antoni’s part is open for debate. But the pattern is undeniable. Here are some of Antoni’s biggest whoppers from the past few years:
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
There are no qualified economists. It is social pseudoscience. Want to wreck your business? Hire economists.
I agree. What a biased, bs article.
According to the rule on bureaus, you need to get rid of three bureaus before starting a new one.
Is that you, Bitch Flowery?
Who even reads the National Rino anymore? Few magazines are less relevant.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Trump thwarted their plan to sabotage his economy with a lying libtard and they’re sore about it.
Agreed. Besides the job calls for a statistician, not an economist.
National Review may as well be Media Matters.
“ What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.”
Instead of biased in the others favor. Got it.
I didn’t realizd what a hack Trump had hired until I saw that both Cato and the Manhattan Institute had called him out for his nutjobbery. Glad to see they are still true to their principles.
NR is just a den of Trump hating a-holes. Nothing of value comes from there.
I put everyone in my department through a basics of statistical process control class. The results were amazing, suddenly everyone started to due very accurate reporting of data, because as part of the class, I showed how efficiency affected department raises. We always came in under time and below budget after that. raises for all.
These numbers are crap now. Most economists admit that. They only bristle over the fact that women lost her job over perpetuating the fraud. They also don’t like that Trump called out the manipulation. Somehow there is always an unpredicted outsized numbers favoring the democrat right before the presidential election. The number gets washed away in the adjustments which come out right after the election. The best example was the 800,000 new jobs that showed up right before the Obama reelection and was wiped away right after the voting ended.
Congratulations on your team’s achievement, Waverunner.
Is there a book, YouTube, or article written for laymen to help understand [at a basic level] statistical process control techniques?
Thanks.
I wouldn’t use the against republicans excuse. I’d question why over 200K jobs disappeared. I’d run on incompetence. I think voters would agree with that more.
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